Art Beat: Exhibit begs for 'rest of story'

Posted: Sunday, September 02, 2007

In mathematics, the term elegance is used when a theory achieves maximum effect with minimum effort. Perhaps that applies to the photographs of Donald M. Robinson, whose "The Face of India" show is now on display at Amarillo Museum of Art. (Two other shows will join it this week, with a member's reception Friday.)

Elegance certainly comes to mind with the photograph selected by the museum to announce the show. It pictures an elegantly attired young woman posed gracefully in an outdoor architectural setting. Tones of tan color - beginning with her skin, extending to her clothing, and continuing in the architecture - bring resonance to the image.

Robinson states, in information in the show, that he likes a photo "to tell a story."

The story here might be one of a fashion shoot in which the photographer also had in mind that "combinations of organic (curved) and inorganic (geometric) forms bring unity and variety to an image." That's one of the credos of early 20th century abstraction.

Careful composition doesn't need to be abstract. In two side-by-side images of young women, one smiles directly at us, her seated position accentuated by a black tire behind her. The other - lost in thought - is framed in a bus or train window.

In many of the portrait images, it's primarily the colorful clothing and/or the facial expressions that engage us. And in urban images it's the activity: the mix of many different sorts of wheeled transportation in a street also containing an elephant, or several settings in which hanging laundry appears. In one very densely detailed photo, a high view of busy public washtubs is surrounded by tin-roofed structures.

Most of these Epson digital prints - 13-by-19 inches to ones roughly twice that size - might well appear in National Geographic magazine; they have that kind of clarity and popular, story-telling quality. But sometimes one might welcome "the rest of the story."

For example, in one image a woman seated on a beach looks out at us, resplendent in red, yellow and green attire. In the photo below her, there's a man down in a narrow hole that's over his head. Careful inspection reveals that both were part of the same scene; one wonders what it was all about.

A book on Robinson's photography is available, in which each image has a title and explanatory comment. Were that the case here, the show might be even more engaging, but as is, there's rich and diverse engagement with people and activities in Mumbai, Jaipar, Agra, Delhi, Bharatpur and Cochin.

Interesting word, "engage." As used by Capt. Kirk in "Star Trek," it meant "on to other worlds and spaces." Which is the case if one goes from the museum to Amarillo College's Lynn Library Southern Light Gallery and Enrico Pozzoli's "Around Water" display.

The "engagement" in Pozzoli's images is not with clear excerpts of reality, but with softly focused, dream-like equivalents of what's "real." As if light and time were proclaiming dimensions of their own, in an altered state of awareness.

We see things - water, boats, jetties, people - but always through a veil that's similar to the original French Impressionist vision. Water-rippled reflections in "Gleaming Light on the Prow" are equivalents of Monet's germinal inspiration.

Light takes on different aspects: lake-like breadth in "Black Steamer," and intensely contrasting, broken strips in "Gleaming..." Those are among the north wall's six images, where people are absent, while across the room all seven photos contain people.

Or spectral distensions of people, their figures attenuated, as in the sculptures of Giacometti. They seem to drift, or float, perhaps "poetically." The procession of figures up and across in "The Small Bridge" struck me as deftly comic, whereas the spectral presences in "Walking the Wall" and "Low Tide" appear as participants in dreams.

Pozzoli's is a symbolic, allusive realm of imagery.

Considering both shows, two biblical phrases come to mind: "Let there be light," and "...many mansions."

Hunter Ingalls held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D.